About This Stamp
Depicting the tender bond between a mother and her child, interpretations of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child take innumerable forms in the Christian art of the Italian Renaissance. This stamp features Virgin and Child, an oil-on-panel painting from the first half of the 16th century.
Art historians who have long speculated about the identity of this artist have sometimes associated this painting and related paintings with the names of various 16th-century figures. However, since the late 1960s, this artist has been known as the Master of the Scandicci Lamentation based on similarities in style evident in a different painting made for a church in the town of Scandicci, near Florence.
Italian Renaissance artists were often inspired to imitate the compositions of their contemporaries. Scholars believe that this artist adapted the poses of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child from the central figures in the Madonna of the Baldacchino, an unfinished altarpiece made by the painter Raphael for a church in Florence between 1506 and 1508.
This painting is in the Robert Dawson Evans Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamp.
This stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp. Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Greg Breeding
Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.
Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.
As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad.
His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts.
Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.